This first volume of Prokofiev’s nine piano sonatas (10 if you include a final fragment) takes us up to No 5. And throughout, Alexandra Silocea, a young Romanian pianist of German-Russian origin who makes her debut on disc here, plays with musical grace and fluency. Alas, such virtues are limiting where Prokofiev’s mordant wit and satire are concerned, and the course of each performance becomes both predictable and unilluminating. There is too little relish of the First Sonata’s ultra-romantic memory of a style Prokofiev later dismissed as passé and regrettable, and, in the Second Sonata’s advance to greater mischief-making and a touch of diablerie, Silocea sounds tame and flavourless. Here, in the Andante, she offers a near-Mendelssohnian display of good manners and it is only in the Fifth Sonata’s piquant flirtation with neo-classicism that she achieves a greater hold on your attention.

Anne Marie-McDermott gives us all the sonatas in performances of an arresting mastery and affinity; and, cruelly but inevitably, you recall Richter’s inimitable verve and authority in Sonatas Nos 2 and 4. Silocea is well recorded (by Sébastien Chonion, who recently inherited the job of recording performances at the Glyndebourne Festival from the late John Barnes) but her playing hardly blazes with a revolutionary brilliance and defiance inseparable from Prokofiev’s character.